May 12, 2007

Examples of the use of RSS are this feed of search engine optimisation steps, or this RSS feed on case studies for the Company Rescue industry, or this feed of chess products from a US retailer. A frequent sight on many sites, what does this symbol do for search engine optimising and for the weight of the site? It’s a method of syndicating the site’s content through to many other sitesÂ where a reference or link can be obtained from the adopting site.Â It’s a construction of a feed in XML (many automated tools exist to construct the feed) which lists the items you want to syndicate, whether it’s products, a list of services, case studies, etc. If done properly, the RSS feed has an amazing leveraging effect on optimising for search engines. Syndicating sites show the link for each item placed in the feed. These links are particularly valuable because they are generally deep linksÂ into the domain and since the list will have some level of comprehensiveness, the links also are comprehensive - one seperate link for every page represented by one item in the multi item RSS feed.

Fortunately, the techie nature of setting up this XML feed is a hurdle that most sites don’t understand and don’t know how to construct - hence its effectiveness for those that overcome the hurdles.